Thirty-three days out from the US mid-term elections and it’s already assumed that a blue wave is heading towards Washington. Polls suggest that the surge will take the House, perhaps even the Senate, as well as serve as an exemplar for Democrats as to how they should fight in 2020.
The logic makes sense. Trump’s approval ratings have flat-lined since he won an election that was itself something of a blip: a quirk of the electoral college that saw the candidate with the most votes come second. It’s not yet clear who Trump’s challenger might be in 2020 and the certainty of his defeat partially rests on that ambiguity.
Any hesitation about calling 2020 this early is compounded by a further difficulty. It’s hard to see how a credible challenger should behave in the Age of Trump. The President has already proven himself to be the Baron Hardup of the politics of pantomime, knowing how to rile his crowds and make them hiss and boo. He knows how to ridicule his opponents and bring low even the most qualified and gifted politicians. The leading candidate in the Republican field in 2016 was Jeb Bush, who Trump destroyed with just two words. “Low-energy”. Jeb’s candidacy was over before it had even begun. So are the Democrats going to out-Trump Trump or try to re-establish how a “proper” president should behave?
If the latter, then the prevailing wisdom is that the Democrats will pick Elizabeth Warren, the senator from Massachusetts, who this week announced her intention to take a “hard look” at running for the presidency. Warren is “Pocahontas” in Trump’s lexicon. She is also liberal, softly spoken, impassioned, and ever so earnest. If she ran, she could easily become an emblem of the cultural mood; the embodiment of the #MeToo movement. The media like her and people like her… Or, at least, she’s admired by those who don’t absolutely loathe her but it’s that loathing which poses a real problem for Democrats.
Trump has never been much of a politician. He is a demagogue engaged in a protracted culture war. He wins where he can sew division between people and the media, the people and the government, the people and some great Other amassed on America’s border. Consider the events of the past few days around Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination. Last week, the President said that the testimony of Dr. Ford was “very compelling and she looks like a very fine woman to me, very fine woman”. On Tuesday night, however, in a rally in Mississippi, he denounced her to cheers from the crowd. It might be “just plain wrong”, as Susan Collins remarked, and, in Jeff Flake’s words, “kind of appalling”, but it was also no accident.
This has become an opportunity for Trump to fight his culture war on a new front and we can be sure that it becomes a battle that becomes more pronounced over the next two years. From the beginning, the gnarly problem of #MeToo has been the way it appears to defy the norms of the judicial process. The onus of a defendant to prove themselves innocent is quite different to the process by which accusers have to make their case. The result, too often, is a liberal overstretch whereby Democrats have overplayed their hand. We witnessed it in the Senate Judiciary Committee last week. Democrats who previously scorned Rudy Giuliani for announcing that “truth isn’t truth” appeared to have no problem with describing Dr. Ford’s testimony as “her truth”. That testimony was certainly persuasive but not so persuasive that Democrats should have immediately pledged their loyalty to it and to her. Instead, they succumbed to a naive sentimentalism that Trump is now cynically and perhaps wisely exploiting. Democrats would be wiser still if they could only recognise it as their worst instinct.
The latest polls suggest that Trump’s new tactics might be motivating more Republicans to vote in the midterms, where the Democrats have long held an advantage. The polls might well narrow in the coming days because there are portions of the American electorate who are uncomfortable with the politics around Kavanaugh’s nomination. Democrats should bear in mind the many who believe Dr. Ford but also accept that her case remains unproven. Indeed, when it comes to choosing a challenger for 2020, the Democrats need somebody who somehow contains these contradictions. They need a candidate who can stand toe-to-toe with Trump whilst also proposing a Democratic agenda that doesn’t alienate middle America.
Warren, for all of her virtues, might not be that candidate. She is, rather, the pick of those liberal voters who remain willfully blind to Trump’s appeal outside the cities and coastal regions. It is hard to imagine Warren winning over blue-collar America in the way that, more obviously, Joe Biden could. Indeed, from the perspective of today, it’s very hard to see beyond Biden. Cory Booker, for example, doesn’t always impress as much as his advocates would wish. The same can’t be said of Kamala Harris or Amy Klobuchar but for either to lead the ticket would assume that American are ready for their first female president. It could be argued that there is no better time but might this be the same presumption of liberal America who routinely underestimates the entrenched conservatism of other parts of the nation?
That is also the weakness of Michael Avenatti who might have proven that he knows how to rile the President but whose media exposure has reached a tipping point where it is becoming detrimental to his potential candidacy. Trump has also demonstrated the danger of media-led popularism and the tectonic instability of charging a celebrity with running a nation. For the Democrats to propose the same would seem, at the very least, hypocritical. At the worst, it would give voters a choice between, to borrow from Donald Rumsfeld, a known unknown and an unknown unknown.
2020 is a long way out and we shouldn’t assume that any of the above will be the Democratic nominee. What we can assume, however, is that whilst Trump is vulnerable, he is not entirely without hope. The very possibility that he will lose could still be enough to ensure that he finds a way to excuse himself from the fight before it even begins. Yet to count him out now is to make a fundamental mistake not just about Trump but about the Democrats’ ability to pick the right candidate. If they continue to delude themselves by existing in an echo chamber of their own values, they might yet leave Trump a narrow but certain path to victory.